Melville House Books

Newly discovered photograph showing Arthur Rimbaud (second from the right)

Both metaphorically and in reality, it has been hard for literary historians to get a picture of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. He produced his best know work while still in his teens, then quit writing to travel the world. Little is known of his activities during his adulthood — he is rumored to have been a gun-runner, and, as discussed in this Will Self commentary, a slave-trader — and he died young. He lived, in short, a rather shady life, and only seven known photographs of him were known to exist — most of them of him in childhood, and most of them blurry or indirect.

Close-up of Rimbaud

But now, a previously unseen photograph of Rimbaud has been discovered. According to a Daily Telegraph report, Jacques Desse and Alban Causse, who call themselves “literary bounty hunters,” “made their extraordinary find when they came across a black and white photo taken circa 1880 among postcards and bric-a-brac in a market ‘somewhere in France’. The photo showed a group of mustachioed bourgeois Frenchmen and one woman in white and was signed Hotel de l’Univers on the back. Rimbaud enthusiasts would know this was the hotel in Aden, Abyssinia, where Rimbaud spent the last years of his life before dying of cancer aged 37.”

According to an Agence France Presse wire story, Rimbaud biographer Jean-Jacques Lefrere, who verified the photo was indeed Rimbaud, says it is “the only one in which Rimbaud’s adult facial characterisics are distinguishable.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.